Darn Nick, I was just going to crack that same joke and you beat it to me.

Polly

Sure, if you’re a girl (or an American male) it’s EASY to convert.

Lindsay Lohan

OMG, ur totally off my frends list, MR. Berack Omaha. ¬_¬

Wes

Wait a minute…she’s a lesbian? I never knew that.

I’m so out of touch…

Apsalar

Wes, she’s been a lesbian for a while. I don’t think anyone would be shocked if tomorrow she decided she wasn’t, though.

Forkboy

I don’t know…..now that she’s converting I find her even hotter!

http://thebitchreport.blogspot.com/ Milena

Whatever, I still love Lindsay Lohan.

re: facebook This is going to be my inner journalism student talking here, but social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter are really changing the way we communicate. Everyone’s on Facebook now – politicians, celebrities, writers, famous activists… Obama, for example, was (and is) huge on Facebook, and he certainly used it to communicate important information to his supporters during his campaign. Same for Clinton. Facebook is the perfect medium for contemporary society, because it’s so instant. It also allows the audience/receiver to have direct interaction with the sender. You don’t get that from newspapers, magazines, or even regular websites. Facebook is still really new as a tool for mass-communication, so it hasn’t acquired the credibility and authority of more traditional media and older new technologies like websites and, to a certain extent, blogs. However, I think you’ll be seeing instant social networking sites, like Facebook, become increasingly mainstream as a tool of mass-communication in the following years.

Jen

I never buy these romantic coversions, and I wonder how they work for a couple, exactly. Does the partner of the ‘correct’ religion simply not care that the conversion is probably not genuine? Does he or she honestly believe that their lover happened to want to be the exact same religion at the exact same time they had to convert? Is it only about the kids? I think its a a strange concept, and I don’t like it.

http://irresistibledisgrace.wordpress.com Andrew S

This is FACEBOOK official, so you know it must be true

lurker_above

This illustrates why I’ve never understood the whole “conversion” thing. I mean, I can see how one could switch from Episcopalian to Catholic, or Unitarian or some other flavor of Christianity. But for a person to convert—really, truly, I-believe-this-with-all-my-heart convert—from Christianity to Judaism, or Judaism to Islam, or to some other diametrically opposite philosophy, seems, at best, cynical and highly improbable.

It would be as if Keith Olbermann suddenly jumped ship to work at Fox and claimed to be O’Reilly’s new BFF.

http://www.liverpool-zen.org.uk Taisen

Why Kabalah < Judaism?

At least with Kabalah, the motivations are usually intrinsic rather than extrinsic. A professor of psychology I know is also a teacher of Kabalah, and is as scornful of this sort of ‘conversion for social purpose’ as you are.

To lurker_above (great name!) – conversion is a tricky subject at the best of times. There areas of psychology & sociology that have been looking at conversion properly for a few decades now – my favourite way of seeing conversion is through the idea of motifs (e.g. Lofland & Skonovd 1981), so conversion has an ‘intellectual’ or ‘mystical’ or ‘coercive’ motif. Each is v different to the others, worth having a look at. “Pauline” conversions are the rarest (sometimes described as ‘hallucinatory’ conversion!!).

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